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Naming a character is like naming your first-born child. You agonize over very detail, even go so far as to pronounce the name under your breath to test the inflection. Lucky for you, you're more concerned with how it looks on paper rather than how it sounds spoken in...

In addition to wearing the Editor in Chief hat here at Outland Entertainment, I also write about pop culture in enough places that I've found it useful to follow the news. While this is particularly relevant for geek news, there are some headliners you just can't...

Outland Entertainment is please to announce a new look and edition for the anthology Blackguards, dividing the book into two volumes and including two never-before-seen stories. Blackguards, originally published by Ragnarok Publications, was a massive volume containing stories from some of the best dark fantasy and grim dark authors in the industry…

Dear Greg (in 1986), So you’ve just turned fourteen, and you’ve just entered your freshman year of high school. I wanted to send you...well, not a pep talk, exactly. You’ve never liked or trusted those; they’re treacherous, and too often they’ve been empty promises,...

This article by fantasy author Melanie R. Meadors first appeared Geek Mom: Geek Speaks...Fiction! Here, Melanie tells us about how she fought the voices (of the characters) in her head…and lost. When editor Marc Tassin invited me to write for the anthology, Champions...

Recently, Publisher Melanie Meadors and Editor in Chief Alana Joli Abbott got together to chat about a serial they're both reading: Born to the Blade. Alana: So, Melanie, how did you feel about Born to the Blade? Melanie: Wow, I have to say, I knew it would be cool,...

Outland Entertainment is pleased to announce they will be publishing a new collection of stories where protagonists’ moral compasses don’t always point north, and where villains are the heroes of their own stories.

Short stories are my first love. As much as I enjoy writing novels and novellas, I keep coming back to short stories. That’s why my first collection, The Voices of Martyrs, means so much to me. But as I’ve reflected on the long journey in getting here, I keep coming...

Dagon's Bones A fast and fun Lovecraft-inspired dice game played in the pubs and bars of Innsmouth. Roll the Bones, pray to Dagon. Utility Games, LLC is proud to announce our first game, debuting on Kickstarter, Dagon's Bones. Dagon's Bones can be taught in minutes,...

From Batman to Star Wars, Jeffrey has tackled numerous fandoms. Now, he faces the Warlock 5 Grid! Did you read Warlock 5 before joining this project? No, unfortunately I had never even heard of Warlock 5 before signing on to work on this project. I was given a .pdf...

So last October, I came across an ad looking for an art team for a new comic project called Dark & Day: Soldiers & Knights. Little did I know when I reached out just what a really cool project this was.

Here’s the basic premise –

A distant future Earth is now split into permanent Ends of night and day. The night/Dark is a culture of machines, technology, soldiers and logical science (science fiction style). The Day is a culture of magic, mythical creatures, knights and belief in wonder (fantasy style). Both sides fear the other and want to protect their people and their way of life.

Jake Grey, the creator, and I started talking and he began to share some of the concept art for the project he’d already developed and scope of the world started to come into focus. I was really floored. If I hadn’t been sold on the premise alone, seeing it brought to life and getting a sense of where Jake wanted to take the project really brought it all home. I knew that this had to be an Outland project.

After some discussion, we settled on Nicolas Giacondino to handle the pencils and inks, and Pedro Figue to take on the color work. We started with a couple test pieces, below –

We were all pretty happy with how the test pieces turned out, so we also brought in Ed Dukeshire to work on the letters. And with that, we had our team. Below is the cover as well as art for the first eight pages of the book.

Jake and I have gone back and forth a lot with this, making sure the art and timeline all works with this project. It’s been a real pleasure together! And expect more updates on this very soon.

Success!

Bleedback is an ambitious comic project that we are working on in conjunction with Scott Nihill and his company Embreate.

Scott was writing an epic sci-fi story and looking for help converting it into a 5-issue comic series. Outland came on in 2012 to manage the project. We handled all of the art including pencils, inks, colors, letters, and design. We’ve since partnered on the project and it’s become a joint venture. In 2013, we successfully funded our Kickstarter to print the first issue. As of July 2014, we are hard at work on issue 2.

So, a little about the project itself:

It’s New York, 2065. Both our dependence on and fear of technology has reached a critical moment. People are playing, fighting, shagging in virtual worlds, robots have become so advanced they might eliminate us. And then comes Bleedback … when activity in the virtual world seeps into the real world with sometimes terrifying consequences. Our central character Andrei, suffers the power of Bleedback firsthand.

The story follows Andrei, brilliant enough to captain any robotics lab but whose criminal record has barred him — on pain of serious prison time — from ever again wielding his gift. So he’s forced to work underground as a Breaker, a specialized hacker able to crack the most sophisticated government mandated robot restraints.

A bike mechanic by day, Andrei moonlights at The Beast, New York’s hottest nightclub, where every desire can be fulfilled … for a price. What free time Andrei has is spent keeping his daughter Angela out of the Global Revolutionary Movement (GRM) and on the right Life Path. Andrei’s comfortable life is turned upside down when a love bot he cracks goes haywire at The Beast. A shadowy military group snatches his daughter and he is hurled into the dark recesses of the global Robo slave trade.

Success!

To say that we’ve been busy this last year is an understatement. We’ve been very fortunate to have a number of different projects come to us that have kept us pretty busy.

One of the more challenging, as well as more fun, is some work for Amazon Studios, which is the production side of Amazon. One of the things they are doing differently than other film production companies or movie studios is that they are doing a lot of visual development work up front. This is to help work out story kinks, test out movie and story ideas with the users at Amazon Studios and focus groups.

We were tasked with creating some short-form, broad-stroke storyboards, called “miniboards.” These basically illustrate the main beats of the story visually so it’s easier for test audiences to digest the story, instead of reading the script.

Codex is the first of three different projects we’re currently working with Amazon to develop visually. The story is a cool little mix of mystery, archaeology, action, and Nazi’s. It has the potential to be pretty fun.

About CodexA graduate student attempts to unlock the secrets encoded within the oldest manuscript of the Old Testament and finds himself on the run from a dangerous society determined to use the secret for their own purposes.

For this project, we tapped Michael Hamlett to illustrate the boards, while I (Jeremy Mohler) handled the lettering. Mike did an outstanding job over quite a few different panels and I would strongly suggest you head over and give the story a read.

Success!

One of the first projects (and actually probably what really got this whole thing rolling) that we worked on as a company was for a very ambitious project for a company up in Canada called Foulplay Entertainment. This is a big project and has been pretty involved, but it has also been fun and I’ve enjoyed working with the project lead, Peter Gammell quite a bit.

The basic premise was for this to be a sort of interactive comic series marketed to iPad. The story revolves around a dystopic future and present day – with our main characters communicating through time to stop a major global catastrophe. Like I said – a very cool and fun idea.

The project came to me by way of Jeff Wamester (who actually did the pencils and inks on the covers for the project). Jeff didn’t have time to take the project on and suggested me as a possible alternative, which I was very grateful for. But, after hearing a little bit about the project, I decided it was probably going to be a little more I could handle on my own. Below are some of the covers that Jeff contributed and I colored.

So after some discussion with Peter, I decided to call on some of my contacts to help. I would do the layouts, color work, and letters for the project and we would outsource for the pencils and inks. This all worked out to our advantage – it allowed us to move a little more quickly through the material, at least that’s what we hoped moving into the project. I was able to recruit and work with a number of talented people, Chris Meeks and Shaun O’Neil among a variety of great artists.

To date, we’ve developed the first two chapters, the first four covers, and a myriad of concept art. Right now the project is on a short hiatus and will hopefully return to production toward the end of the year. If you want to check everything out in action, you can do so over at the Foulplay website.

I’m going to occasionally post up a variety of process art. I enjoy seeing how things come together and it’ll be nice to show a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes as well.

Below you can see our process on page two of chapter one. I did the layout, color work, and letters. Shaun O’Neil did the pencils and inks.

For me, I find it really enjoyable to see how another artist can take my layouts and flesh them out into a fully finished page. I think Shaun did a fantastic job with this page – he was able to take my layouts and really bring this future city to life. I also had a lot of fun doing the color work here – it’s always a great deal of fun to handle the colors, but it’s even more fun when you get to work with other talented creators.